The CCO is suddenly the hardest C-role to fill

Early 2025, I wrote my first newsletter on AI. It reads now with a certain nostalgia: an earnest reflection on Laloux and the question of what AI would do to our image of human beings in organisations. A touch saccharine, in hindsight. Because AI did not wait for our philosophy. It rolled straight in through the front door, and headed immediately for the place where revenue arrives: marketing and sales.

Anyone who opened the Financial Times last weekend will have seen it confirmed. McDonald's in the Netherlands was howled down in December for an AI-generated Christmas advert. Too creepy, too flat, too vacuous. Offline within days. McDonald's itself called the episode an important learning. Euphemism of the year.

But the broader story in the FT is more fundamental. AI is not simply yet another new channel. It is changing the game itself. David Jones, founder of Brandtech, makes the point sharply: every piece of content you produce today is, simultaneously, a briefing to someone's AI model. Your website, your brochures, your product pages, your press releases, that is no longer material for your customer. It is material for your customer's assistant.

And that customer, consumer and procurement officer alike, is increasingly no longer searching for themselves. They delegate. Book a hotel. Order packaging materials. Compare three insurance policies. Welcome to what the Americans are calling “agentic commerce”. In that world, being visible to humans is no longer enough. Your brand has to come well-recommended by Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini.

All of which brings us, unavoidably, to the Chief Commercial Officer. I will stake the claim: there is no C-role whose profile is changing as fast as this one right now. And no C-role that boards so consistently underestimate when they come to fill it.

Today's CCO stands at a crossroads. One foot in marketing, one in sales. All around: IT, which has to deliver the data; finance, guarding the margins; operations, which has to deliver on time; and HR, tasked with finding the commercial talent before the competition does. No role has more interfaces. And none demands such a combination of strategic helicopter view and operational decisiveness.

Mark this: a capacity for abstraction is not a luxury here but a prerequisite. The CCO must grasp what agentic commerce will mean for brand positioning three years out. They must negotiate data arrangements with retailers, distributors, platforms and, increasingly, AI providers. They have to see the entire chain: B2B, B2C, and the more complex B2B2C dance in which brands are growing ever more dependent on retailers and platforms for that final point of contact with the end-customer.

And at the same time, that same CCO has to be able to walk through a dashboard with sales operations on a Tuesday morning, ask why conversion in segment X has dropped, and have a fix in place within forty-eight hours. Tactics is not a dirty word. Operational effectiveness is not “junior work”. Anyone who only flies at thirty thousand feet will not see the craters in their own funnel.

Which means, plainly: numbers, dashboards, data. The days when a CCO could navigate by feel and relationships are over. Not because feel and relationships no longer matter, they matter more than ever, but because they must now be backed by measurable results. And because external partners in the chain, retailers, distributors, platforms, agencies, technology providers, will only engage seriously with a counterpart who knows what they are talking about. With numbers. Not with mood music.

Tomorrow's CCO is therefore part philosopher, part mechanic. Someone who clearly sees how AI is reshaping the commercial landscape, while still picking apart a conversion dashboard the same afternoon. Someone who can genuinely partner with the companies their brand depends on, while those same companies are quite possibly also competitors.

A rare profile. But indispensable. And, in many C-teams, already the bottleneck.

If you would like to exchange thoughts on this, on the role of the CCO in your own organisation, or on finding and selecting the right CCO for its future, you are most welcome.

Warm regards,

Aegeus